“Love Your Fat Self”

One of our class discussions this semester hit close to home. We read a couple stories that day but one titled “Love your fat self” really opened my eyes. Some of the topics we talked about on this particular day were: body image, how we see ourselves, and why this is a problem. I want to discuss my personal struggle with body image and further develop ideas that we discussed in class.

My struggle with weight started my sophomore year in high school. My poor self esteem came from my mom. My mom has always been beautiful and teeny tiny. She never worked growing up and she spent most of her days going to the gym and making sure she looked good. While I was growing up she would frequently make snide remarks like, “A minute on your lips, a lifetime on your hips!” Or, “are you sure you want to eat ANOTHER cookie?” I usually brushed her comments off and I never realized how much they hurt my feelings. Eventually I started to see myself as disgusting and I hated the way I looked. I would go on diet after diet but nothing would stop my moms comments. I started out by skipping a snack one day, then skipping a meal, then skipping two meals, then excessively working out, and so on and so forth. This eventually turned into a full blown eating disorder that ended with me being in the hospital time and time again. I went to a countless number of psychologists and was on numerous medicines but the only thing that really worked for me was time. I still have these thoughts and feelings years later, but for the most part, I can say I’m completely over this struggle. THANK GOD.

In this article, a girl is getting off the train and a random guy yells and says “Yeah, that’s right, get off the train, you fat bitch!” It then goes on to discuss how this causes emotional and psychological damages and later talks about the reasons people become fat and how a certain number on the scale doesn’t matter in the long run. What matters is how you view yourself. No matter how thin you manage to become, if you see yourself as fat, you will never be happy. Society has trained us to view fat as ugly and unacceptable. We never see images of normal or overweight people. We only see pictures of girls in bikinis, girls in tight dresses, girls in short dresses, and girls that are heavily photoshopped. We never see anything “real.” And in reality, girls that are a little overweight or girls that don’t have a flat stomach are “real.” The average girl isn’t a size two. The average girl has a stomach that isn’t flat and her hair isn’t always long and blonde. Beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors and this article did an excellent job of explaining beauty. While thinking about what to write on this blog post, I came across some vintage ads. Vintage ads used to define beauty in a completely different way. Years ago, beauty wasn’t all about being skinny. In my opinion, when society starts to bring back these kinds of beauty ideals, less people will go through the struggle that I went through.